TV Station Raid in Georgia Leads to Protests and Cabinet's Ouster

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: November 2, 2001

MOSCOW, Nov. 1—
Already racked by tensions with Russia and a guerrilla war, Georgia descended further into political crisis today after a police raid on a popular television station set off mass protests and the dismissal of most of the government.

President Eduard Shevardnadze said he had discharged his cabinet ''taking into account the situation inside the Parliament and outside.'' That was a reference both to the storm of criticism leveled against him by the legislators and to the 5,000 chanting protesters on the streets of Tbilisi, the capital, outside their chamber.

But the dismissals did not appear to satisfy the demonstrators, some of whom were demanding that Mr. Shevardnadze resign after nine years of tumultuous rule.

''He has insulted us,'' a protester told the Russian television network NTV as he drew a mocking caricature of Mr. Shevardnadze on a sheet of paper.

The latest crisis began on Tuesday after federal security police raided the television channel Rustavi-2, which has regularly criticized Mr. Shevardnadze's government. The raid was billed as a hunt for evidence of financial misdeeds.

Protesters quickly flooded streets outside Parliament, calling the raid an attack on a free press and drawing parallels with the Russian government's legalistic assault earlier this year on NTV, then the Kremlin's leading critic. NTV has since come under control of the state-dominated natural gas monopoly Gazprom.

Mr. Shevardnadze first likened the protests to a coup attempt, then threatened to quit -- a ploy he had used to defuse past crises -- if Parliament tried to punish his government in retaliation for the raid.

But he relented and dismissed most of the government himself today, then went on national television to declare that the situation demanded that he remain in office to form a new cabinet.

Even some of Mr. Shevardnadze's critics agreed with that. But many made clear that their support for him was purely temporary.

On the Russian state network RTR, the newly resigned speaker of Parliament, Zurab Zhvaniya, who has long been seen as one of the president's close allies, said Mr. Shevardnadze's departure now would tip Georgia ''into the abyss of instability.''

But Mr. Zhvaniya also said the raid on Rustavi-2 showed the arbitrariness of Georgian rule and the degree to which official corruption had permeated the government.

The chairman of Parliament's defense committee, Georgy Baramidze, also said Mr. Shevardnadze should stay in office, but only until special elections are held to choose a new legislature. An early resignation, he said, would create a political vacuum.

As foreign minister under Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the final days of the Soviet Union, Mr. Shevardnadze was hailed worldwide for helping to ensure that the dissolution of the Soviet state was peaceful. His rule in Georgia, where he assumed power after the overthrow of the nation's first president in 1992, has met with far less acclaim.

Corruption is widespread, the economy is stalled and Georgia's westernmost region, Abkhazia, was seized by separatists in 1994 after a bloody war that turned 250,000 Georgians into refugees.

Russia has tacitly supported the Abkhazian leaders and increasingly accused Mr. Shevardnadze of allowing Islamic militants to use Georgia as a staging ground for their war in Chechnya, on Georgia's northern border.